Featuring...
December 2020
pre November 2018
muse-letter \’myüz-‘le-tər noun
1: a personal message, inspired by a muse of one's own creation, addressed to a person or organization, in the course of which, the sender becomes absorbed in thought; especially turning something over in the mind meditatively and often inconclusively.
2: a letter from a poet, or one who envisions oneself as such, in which he or she “muses” on that which is perceived to be news, or newsworthy, usually in some ironic or absurd way.
Parts of the site under reconstruction
Reprised November Quote of the Month/New Context
"Be not afraid of greatness.
Some are born great,
some achieve greatness,
and others have greatness
thrust upon them."
William Shakespeare
Twelfth Night
Or...
...Ding Dong the Witch is Dead
and the Tortoise Beats the “Hair”
This cross pollination of two fantastical analogies came to mind that Saturday four days after election day, when the erstwhile “Sleepy Joe” was projected to be the next President of the United States.
Part I begins with The Wizard of Oz, a favorite movie of mine that I often reference. In the immediate aftermath of that Tuesday, I saw a Biden still stuck in Kansas. With a possible a constitutional crisis cyclone looming up ahead (“Poor little kid, I hope she gets home alright”).
But as the tale unfolded, it got better--- depending on your POV of course--- till it reached that pivotal scene of a sudden, ironic, shift in power, what with Dorothy throwing some water, accidently, on an archetype of evil, The Wicked Witch (of the West, to complete the alliteration). Though I guess in a #MeToo sensibility and political correctness regarding W3, she might be referred to as “a person of great ambition, who through no fault of her own, appears to be morally challenged.”
Analogous Joe, in his Dorothy moment, tosses water on DJT. And... Ok, it had taken him a while to find that bucket (of votes), but lo, and even behold, could it be? The villain in the piece, started to melt before our very eyes. Not to mention those of the world.
“This is a major fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner.”
“Don't throw that water!”
“So we’ll be going to the US Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”
“You cursed brat!”
“We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list. Okay?”
“Look what you've done!” I'm melting! Melting!”
"If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us."
“Oh, what a world! What a world! Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?”
I tried to process what I had just seen and heard. This was our President, in a fit of fabrication, throwing us, as in the U.S., under an 18-wheeler. Saying that we the people are corrupt. In fact, we are so good at this corruption, that we can conspire to create a grand conspiracy across several states targeting only him. The Republican downballot faired well, he fails to note. "Stop counting the votes!" Though not in Arizona. Where it seemed to be swinging in his favor. (But it’s a dry vote).
Meanwhile back at the analogy, how did the Winged Monkeys react to the grotesque demise of W3 who had subjugated them to her will? In unison: “Hail! Hail to Dorothy! The Wicked Witch is dead!”
Though here, reality takes a surprising turn from the script, as I try tenaciously, to cling to my analogy. Monkeys named McConnell, Graham, Cruz, Cornyn etc. continued to fly about the castle. Defending the indefensible, on the grounds that as that cloak and hat and broom still remained, he was somehow still alive.
Turning the focus now to Biden’s achievement in lieu of Trump’s downfall. Part II. Oz giving way to the tortoise and hare.
To refresh our memory of that Aesop fable, here’s the version that sits in the Library of Congress. Along with some blue-penciled parenthetical commentary.
It’s very short, but if you don’t care to read through it, you can “cut through the chase,” so to speak.
A Hare was making fun of the Tortoise one day for being so slow (i.e. “Sleepy Joe”).
"Do you ever get anywhere?" he asked with a mocking laugh (implying Sleepy Joe has been at this for 40 years, and is still a loser).
"Yes," replied the Tortoise, "and I get there sooner than you think. I'll run you a race and prove it"(“I’m going to beat Donald Trump like a drum.” 2/19/2020).
The Hare was much amused at the idea of running a race with the Tortoise, but for the fun of the thing he agreed. So the Fox (William Barr…), who had consented to act as judge, marked the distance and started the runners off (…and directed federal prosecutors to investigate any "substantial allegations" of election-related fraud before the certified results of the race was over).
The Hare was soon far out of sight (i.e. Tuesday night), and to make the Tortoise feel very deeply how ridiculous it was for him to try a race with a Hare, he lay down beside the course to take a nap (…with dreams of his base turning out with a vengeance) until the Tortoise should catch up.
The Tortoise meanwhile kept going slowly but steadily, and, after a time (the next morning), passed the place where the Hare was sleeping. But the Hare slept on very peacefully...
...and when at last he did wake up, the Tortoise was near the goal (270 Electoral Votes). The Hare now ran his swiftest, but he could not overtake the Tortoise in time. (And for the rest of his life boys and girls, the “Hair” would cry "Fraud!" and refuse to concede).
Signed, sealed and delivered, Joseph R. Biden will become our 46th President on January 20, 2021.
Regardless of our political affiliations and philosophies, and beyond the pros and cons of one policy vs. another, I can’t help but refer to something that Lindsay Graham once said five years ago before he morphed into Mr. Hyde (and later, a Winged Monkey):
"The bottom line is if you can't admire Joe Biden as a person, you got a problem. You need to do some self-evaluation, cause what's not to like,"
And he actually teared up as he went on to say…
"…as good a man as God ever created."
I can only wonder who created the other guy.
Our arrival had disturbed
the fresh fallen snow
in the alley leading up
to a place hard to find.
I note your footprints as you do mine;
a playful jousting on correlation to size ensues.
Then reaching North and South Pole polemics
we pitch our flags.
You will tell me and I will tell you
what we most need to bewail
over pints of dark ale
with a clicking of dimpled glasses---cheers!
After a few, come the sound-bite philosophies,
the toy soldier talking points
marching across the table,
voices reaching an octave higher,
conspiracy theories dense as cheddar cheese,
the thermostat of exchange
plummeting towards zero.
Celsius or Fahrenheit, whichever you prefer.
Somewhere through a blizzard of time
roads had diverged.
Ancient, unwritten, unspoken rules broken.
Blackboard ABC lessons erased.
The snow concludes in a crescendo of silence
as we later go about our tribal ways;
pledging to meet again in "spring-mending time"
as Frost would have it.
Ron Vazzano
At Ye Olde Mitre
"No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses… this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence ... I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. etc.
Madeleine or magic mushrooms, Marcel?
My tale is far less dramatic, and nearer to one of curiosity and reconciliation of sorts. Nearer to one of fascination with variations on a theme. Which was all triggered by a cousin showing up a couple of months ago at an aunt’s house, with a bag of limited edition, “Halloween” Oreos.
Being a purist, my first reaction had to do with the center filling---always as white as a virgin snow--- now bastardized by orange food coloring. But beyond color distortion, how could I have ever eaten a “food” product, containing something that even by the company’s own admission, is so indescribable, that they eventually resorted to calling that center filling, “stuff”? Which they tried to jazz up by dropping one “f” as in… Stuf.
Now really intrigued, I read the side of the bag. which is not something you want to do with any packaged treat or snack manufactured by a corporate giant. Let’s put it this way, you won’t find Oreos in a health food store. Nor slumming through snooty Whole Foods. I counted 20 ingredients, starting with sugar then going on to some additives that sound like something out of a high school chem class. And food coloring itself is hardly benign. “Artificial food dyes are petroleum-derived substances that give color to food. The safety of these dyes is highly controversial,” according to healthline.com.
But all health concerns be damned on this day. Having not tasted an Oreo in almost 40 years (is that possible?), and with a bag of them before me now, I couldn’t resist. If Covid-19 hasn’t killed me yet (knock on wood... then wash your hands), surely one Oreo couldn’t do me in. And what am I, a snowflake? Except I scoffed down three. And instantly, was re-hooked. And had to restrain myself from reaching for a fourth.
This turns out not to be so surprising. A study at Connecticut College seven years ago concluded that they are addictive. They activate more neurons in the brain’s “pleasure center” than drugs such as cocaine. Damn lab rats. Always revealing something that we'd rather not know.
You could add Oreos to that list of consumables that ought to be illegal to sell, as they taste so good, yet are so bad; bacon, potato chips, ice cream et al. In fact, a lawsuit was filed years ago in California (where else), that sought to ban the sale of Oreos to children, taking Nabisco to task over trans fat's effects of the cookie. A lawsuit that had a trans-fat chance of winning.
There’s also an esoteric dimension to Oreos that’s in play here. A book entitled Quintessance: The Quality of Having It (Crown Publishers Inc. 1983), includes the Oreo among 64 other “quintessential” items large and small. As to what is quintessence? According to the authors...
“An entity that exhibits a rare and mysterious capacity to be just exactly what they ought to be…which offer more to us than we specifically ask of them…
The pleasure such things offer us is wonderful and illogical; it is very desirable.”
As applied to an Oreo, I’ll buy that. And to add to what goes unmentioned in the book, I find that bold, flawlessly etched, insignia stunning. And as you might expect, I wondered what might have inspired its creation. And as you might expect, I Googled it.
“A circle topped with a two-bar cross is a Nabisco logo that stands for a European symbol of quality.
Experts believe the design for the Nabisco symbol arose from the Cross of Lorraine, which was carried by the Knights Templar during the First Crusade in the 11th century."
Ouch. I’m not going there lest I find myself back in The Da Vinci Code.
I wondered now what else was going on with this addictive, unhealthy cookie, in my absence. I discovered what I’ll call the Neo-Oreo Age. One that more or less began in 2000AD. Adding extra Stuf, and sometimes re-coloring it, was only the beginning. In style and substance, there were seemingly now an infinite number of choices to satisfy every sweet-tooth fetish. As if some sort of “cookie porn.” I stopped counting at around 50 variations. A sampling...
Many of these are “limited editions,” some seasonal, and most only available online or in selected stores. Some of these are pretty half-baked conceptions when you come right down to it.
I’ve had about a half dozen variations to date. (The Gingerbread and the Caramel Coconut Oreos are to die for). All for the purpose of research of course. And I’ve promised myself that once this project is finished and I get it out of my system, I’ll stop. But only after having a taste of this latest discovery.
"... was invented inside brothels in the gorgeous northern Italian town of Treviso,
renowned for its sexually relaxed mores and pleasure-seeking inhabitants. In Italian,
tiramisu literally means “pull me up, lift me up”, or, more literally,“pull it up.”
Google and thou shall find. I'm sure the Christian Right knows nothing about this. It's best we keep this to ourselves.
So what to make of all of this? Aside from a harkening back to simpler days of indulgence when life seemed literally and figuratively sweeter? Ala, a poor man’s Proust? Yes. There’s that. But merely, a starting point.
There's also the re-awakening to one's eating habits. And how easily we can become seduced into consuming that which is not only unhealthy, but addictive. And that one can be both, a consenting party, and yet being taken at the same time, in pursuit of one's guilty pleasures.
Finally, on a loftier plane with some philosophical overtones, when you consider the classic original Oreo (introduced in 1912), vis-à-vis the cookies that have come out of Neo-Oreo Age, it strikes me as having two honored axioms at loggerheads.
Toto Kornacki, seen here assessing the situation following the “high water” mark of 270 being exceeded.
The Inside and Out of reos
I had broken it off with Oreos several decades ago. It was amicable. Love for them had faded as I went kicking and screaming into my thirties. And then too, a wife had cajoled me into thinking in terms of healthier habits. So no more Oreos. I should have seen that crumbling. (Not to mention the marriage).
In my youth, it was my go-to cookie. Sometimes I would stray with a Fig Newton or Lorna Doone (“I’d fly to the moon/ for a Lorna Doone”). Maybe some one-day stands with unnamed chocolate chip sweeties here or there. A vanilla wafer on the side. But despite positive associations with this treat of ages past, I’m not going to go all Proustian here in a Search for Lost Time. He with his precious Madeleines being dipped into a cup of tea, setting off an acid-like tripping.
Ron Vazzano
So which is it? As a purist at heart, shaped in part by circumstances inherent in the developmental years, my sentiments tend toward the former. Yet my actions often run toward the latter.
This is most obvious, when exploring realms within which lie excess in choices and variety. Even when it happens to be about something so mundane, as a cookie. At least on the surface. And I didn't even get into Nabisco's hostile takeover of Hydrox, a brand which preceded Oreos, from whom Nabisco stole the sandwich cookie concept. For it was Hydrox that originally had "the right stuff" to coin a phrase. A whole other story in itself. And stories are breeding grounds for metaphors and analogies that are applicable to some life experiences. And through them, all things seem interconnected. Though in so saying, to paraphrase Freud's alleged comment about a cigar, I do recognize that sometimes a cookie is just a cookie. In the meantime, in the spirit of the upcoming holidays, let there be much...
This iteration is no doubt aimed at the crème de la crème, so to speak. They with their weekend beachfront homes in The Hamptons or on Martha’s Vineyard. I doubt there is anyone in Iowa eating Tiramisu Oreos.And it is interesting to note that Tiramisu...
Less is more... MORE IS NEVER ENOUGH
Odd Word of the Month
kakorrhaphiophobia n.
The morbid fear of failure.
Source: The Superior Person's Second Book of Weird & Wondrous Words by Peter Bowler
Used in a sentence
It was kakorrhaphiophobia that kept him from entering the race for the vacant Senate seat.
The following is reprised (with some tweaking) from December 2014 MuseLetter.
Trains: A Christmas Story
I can never remember whether it snowed
for six days and six nights when I was twelve
or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights
when I was six.
—Dylan Thomas
How badly he had wanted trains
for six years and counting,
but “Be the last kid on your block,”
seemed his bare bones fate decreed.
Nothing fancy just a five car set.
Just the workhorse grit of the locomotive
to race across the mind’s fruited plains
pulling the coal car loyally brimming
with fuel to stoke the engine heart.
Then gondola and box car sharing the load;
the black sheep red caboose trailing—
all subject to a power surge at his command.
Through a tunnel in a wonderous winter village
this train might repeatedly pass;
though a mother might knock down a signpost or two
in the errant sway of her terry cloth robe.
They might all be giants for two weeks each year
roaming a world set beneath their stocking feet
a gift to be viewed through a small window of time,
for it would mainly remain in the box across
that slow passage of changing seasons.
No room in that flat for a layout of track
the whole year round. How a family had
such little space and even less money.
To know how badly he had wanted trains
you would have had to have sat in the dark
that one Christmas Eve and waited
with the others in a room that faced a back alley—
a room blacker than Lucifer’s heart, except
for one tiny light
a beacon in motion
punching a hole in all expectations
working the floor in ovular fashion
an unmistakable path of passion
the scaled down thunder of electric trains!
A sudden drown out by a frenzy of voices:
“Surprise! Merry Christmas!” And he started with a cry
that shortly gave way to sobbing;
these could not possibly be his trains.
Somehow a sinister switch of track
from his best friend’s place upstairs—
MARTY’S TRAINS?!”
A trick of time and space and another dimension?
No, his trains from somewhere over the rainbow
had finally arrived. And in the presence no less,
of a multi-headed monster Witness waiting in the dark.
Now visible as someone has turned on the lights.
A moment of the best of intentions derailed,
all look down as though to consider
the state of their shoes.
The boy and the beacon lost in the transformation.
finito
Ron Vazzano
Ron Vazzano
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